There’s no catch here. It’s a feature-rich switch. Comparable to a Cisco Catalyst 2960 – the next step up from the 500 series – the biggest differences I see are:

CLI – TextView

Not quite IOS but the commands are very much the same.

Marvell silicon

Not the Cisco manufactured silicon.

For a small and medium business, the Cisco 500 series switches are great. It’s a stackable up to 8 switches and is capable of doing 10 Gigabit. Those are features required for a growing SMB. But in this post I will be focusing on getting it up and running.

To get the Cisco SMB 500 switch online, you can either begin configuring the device through a serial console cable or allow the switch to acquire a DHCP address.

I’ll start the configuration at the command line. First thing to notice is, the switch doesn’t use IOS. It uses a very similar command line called TextView. The commands are almost identical, maybe even the same.

The default username and password of the Cisco 500 switch is cisco / cisco.

Here’s my initial configuration to enable network connectivity:

switchad0a6e#conf t
switchad0a6e(config)#vlan 101
switchad0a6e(config)#int vlan 101
switchad0a6e(config-if)#ip address 172.21.101.254 255.255.255.0
Please ensure that the port through which the device is managed has the proper
settings and is a member of the new management interface.
Would you like to apply this new configuration? (Y/N)[N] Y

I couldn’t get the virtual switch to work with my wifi adapter if my life depended on it. Figured out there was some issue, which I still haven’t found the real reason why, that prevented Hyper-V from using the wifi adapter in the virtual switch.

The workaround is to create an Internal virtual switch and then set your wifi adapter to share the connection with the virtual adapter that is created. Take a look:

In Virtual Switch Manager, create an Internal network virtual switch

Creating a Virtual Switch in Hyper-V

Open the Properties of your wireless adapter

Click on the Sharing tab and enable “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection” and from the drop down menu select the virtual switch you created.

NIC Teaming was a feature we obtained through independent hardware vendors such as Broadcom. A separate piece of software was installed and you went through a GUI to team your interfaces. Sometimes it was easy to do, sometimes it wasn’t.

Windows Server 2012 now has NIC Teaming built-in. NIC Teaming is the act of bonding network adapters to form one logical network adapter. It provides useful features such as load balancing across individual links and failover.

You can do NIC Teaming in two configurations:

Switch-dependent mode — Connecting all network adapters to the same switch.

In March 2014 I was tasked with a new wireless deployment in a unique environment. The building had plaster on top of two inch plywood with stone inside and outside the structure. Aesthetics was a high priority which made the task that much more difficult.

Going into this project I knew I had to perform a wireless site survey before deploying a Cisco WLAN Controller and about 15 access points. Another vendor was working on a separate project that relied on the wireless network. They initially walked through the building with their wireless phones stating dropped areas (there was a previous wifi installation but was being revamped by me.)

With much research, I decided to purchase Ekahau Site Survey with the purpose of planning, deploying, and troubleshooting this new wireless deployment.

The Ekahau Site Survey purchase included the USB Adapter for the survey and the software. Through my reseller, the cost was $3,500. It supports Windows 7 and 8 and you need at least 4GB of RAM or more. Sorry OS X users. It might work through Parallels.

In the rest of this blog post I will be referring to the planning portion of Ekahau Site Survey.

The IT community is very small in San Diego. Go to any user group and guaranteed you’re connected to someone through a colleague. Many IT beginners show up looking to interact with other techies and engineers, hungry for information and knowledge.

Some ask for tips on getting their foot into network engineering, security, etc. My tips aren’t very technical at all but they will get you far. Below are my top 7 tips for IT beginners.

Build Confidence

Build confidence. Image from Wall-E.

Over the course of my IT career I have learned that being soft spoken doesn’t give you much of an advantage. You may come across as not knowing what the solution is, scared, not friendly, or just shy. Either way, people tend to go around you.

When I first started I was afraid to walk up to people to discuss their IT challenges. I spoke very softly. I failed to portray any sense of confidence in what I was doing. Clients can quickly lose trust in your decisions.

Overcome any fears of being shy. Speak up a little bit louder so you are heard. Sound confident when communicating. Be prepared to answer the “Why?” questions. This involves understanding the technology you are troubleshooting or explaining. Knowing as much as possible helps boost your confidence. My confidence has been deflated a couple of times because I simply did not have enough information to back my responses.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” There is a lot involved with technology and no one knows it all. I wouldn’t leaving it hanging at “I don’t know” but you should follow that sentence with something along the lines of “I will find out and get back to you tomorrow, is that okay?”